This weekend’s Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts (beginning on Thursday, 19 February 2015, conducted by Stéphane Denève) include the stylized jazz of Darius Milhaud‘s score for the 1923 ballet La création du monde. Commissioned by the Ballets Suédois, a short-lived rival to the more famous Ballets Russes, La création du monde joined a long line of artworks and spectacles in which European artists leveraged the perceived frisson of non-European cultures. Africa inspired La création du monde: writer Blaise Cendrars fashioned a scenario from African creation myths he collected for his Anthologie nègre; artist Fernand Léger based his set and costume designs on African sculpture. The goal was less authenticity than shock. (Milhaud recalled Léger rejecting designs because they were “too bright and ‘pretty-pretty.’”)

Milhaud brought jazz into the mix. He missed the first Parisian vogue for jazz (he was in Brazil, serving as secretary to the French ambassador, playwright Paul Claudel), but was smitten after hearing it in London; he later traveled to New York and visited jazz clubs in Harlem. Jazzy touches were already commonplace back in Paris, but Milhaud wanted something closer to the source. He favored the tumult of the improvisation he heard in Harlem over the tightly arranged stylings of the largely white bands that played in Europe; La création du monde is fully composed, but its Baroque-inspired prelude-and-fugue form was designed to capture jazz’s contrapuntal frenzy. Milhaud was determined to get the sound right, limiting the strings to single players – letting winds, piano, and percussion dominate – and prominently featuring the saxophone, its tone (as Milhaud described it) “squeezing the juice out of dreams.”

The score also preserves a fluid moment in the history of art. As the twentieth century progressed, modernism and popular culture became adversaries, but, at the time of La création du monde, modernists could engage with pop on terms that were equal parts celebration and sabotage. Milhaud’s music pushes against both sides: the orchestra sounds like a jazz band, the jazz band plays like Bach, Bach underpins a pagan ritual, the ritual fuels Parisian fashion. Every element tries to reshape every other by force of collision. (Not incidentally, La création du monde premiered on a double bill with Within the Quota, scored by Cole Porter.)

The revolution didn’t pan out – commercial forces commodified jazz, cosseted classical music into plush escapism, and ensured a long estrangement between pop and the avant-garde. But La création du monde still shouts an objection with atypical style.

Ward Swingle, who died on 19 January 2015 at age 87, was the founding father of the Swingle Singers, the a cappella group that blended jazz rhythms with Baroque and classical music in a distinctive, easy-listening style. The group made its name with scat renditions of Bach: lots of “doob-a-do” and “bah-bah-badah” substituting for the keyboard strokes more commonly heard in works such as The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080).

Critics could be wary. “The history of pop music is littered with jazzed-up versions of the classics,” sniffed The Times after they packed the Albert Hall in April 1965, before conceding that some people “truly find that the music’s enjoyable qualities profit by being brought up to date”. Others believed that in the same way that Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey introduced many people to Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, so Bach with a swing was an enticing introduction to Johann Sebastian’s carefully knitted counterpoint.

Not only did Swingle and his minstrels receive endorsement at the box office, major classical names such as John Barbirolli, Yehudi Menuhin and Glenn Gould offered their backing. George Malcolm, the renowned harpsichordist, shared the stage with them at the Festival Hall in 1966 in a program entitled “Jazz Sébastien Bach,” which was also the name of their first album.

Meanwhile, contemporary composers came calling. Luciano Berio wrote his colorful and noisy four-movement Sinfonia for the Swingle Singers, which they premiered with the New York Philharmonic in 1968 and performed at the Proms in 1969, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.

Ward Lemar Swingle was born on September 21 1927 in Mobile, Alabama, where, he once said, the sounds of New Orleans float along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. He took to the piano from an early age and with his older brother, Ira, played lunchtime concerts in the school cafeteria, garnering sufficient popularity to be elected as president and vice-president respectively of their student council. By the time he left school, Ward, Ira and one of their sisters, Nina, were touring with the Ted Fio Rito Orchestra.

He studied music at the Cincinnati Conservatory, where he met his future wife, a French-born violinist, and won a Fulbright scholarship to pursue his musical studies in postwar Paris, taking lessons there with the celebrated pianist Walter Gieseking. Soon he was working as a rehearsal pianist for Roland Petit’s Ballet de Paris at a time when Petit was exploring jazz rhythms in his choreography.

Swingle’s first singing work – his voice was a mellifluous tenor – was with Blossom Dearie’s Les Blue Stars, a French vocal group whose members included Christiane Legrand, the sister of Michel Legrand, the composer. From there he joined Mimi Perrin’s Les Double Six, which won acclaim for its electronic treatment of jazz standards.

As Perrin’s health deteriorated in the early 1960s, Swingle, Legrand and other members of the group began singing privately, experimenting with jazzed-up Bach arrangements with the aim of improving their collective vocal agility. By 1962 the eight-member group was performing in public as Les Swingle Singers. Their concerts proved to be great hits with audiences, especially in Britain, and their early recordings won five Grammy awards.

By the early 1970s Swingle felt that he had exhausted the repertoire possibilities with his Parisian singers. He also wanted to experiment with other techniques, including close-mic singing. Crossing the Channel in 1973 he set up Swingle II, or the New Swingle Singers. The traditional swing music remained, but listeners were now regaled with jazz renditions from a wider selection of musical traditions, ranging from Baroque to big band. As well as looking forward, the Swingle Singers now also began looking into music’s back catalogue, releasing a disc of madrigals with a jazz twist in 1974.

Britain proved to be fertile ground. There were invitations to music festivals around the country as well as plentiful radio work. In 1982, for example, the Swingle Singers appeared in a televised concert from St. Paul Cathedral performing the sacred music of Duke Ellington with Tony Bennett, Phyllis Hyman and McHenry Boatwright.

After recording the Berio Sinfonia under the baton of Pierre Boulez in 1984, Ward Swingle stepped back from frontline singing to return to the United States. He remained the group’s musical adviser, while also running vocal workshops and publishing his many musical arrangements. He was often invited to share the techniques that he had developed for the Swingle Singers with established groups, such as the Stockholm Chamber Choir and the BBC Northern Singers.

A decade later Swingle moved back to France, and latterly was living in Britain. His book Swingle Singing, published in 1999, tells not only the history of the group, but also takes a musicological look at the techniques that he developed.

Today the Swingle Singers, now a seven-member ensemble, continue to push the boundaries of vocal music while also making recordings for television programs and films, including Sex and the City. Around seventy alumni keep in touch regularly, many of them gathering to celebrate Ward Swingle’s eightieth birthday in 2007, when the Berio was heard once again at the Proms.

He is survived by his wife, Françoise Demorest, whom he married in 1952, and by their three daughters.

The music of Johann Sebastian Bach receives an innovative eastern spin in the hands of musicians Burhan Öçal, a Turkish percussionist, and Ukrainian pianist Alexey Botvinov, in their interpretation of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988). Since debuting the work in 2010, “Bach Reloaded” has been performed across Europe and recently received its Middle East debut in Abu Dhabi at the Emirates Palace.

Saeed Saeed (SS) How did you and Botvinov come up with the concept of Bach Reloaded?

Burhan Öçal (BÖ) I’ve been dreaming about this project for fifteen to twenty years. However, as you know, Bach is such a prominent composer in the western classical-music world that it is very risky to even play his non-religious compositions, and not a lot of people have the courage to do this. So, it was not easy for us to revise his compositions with Turkish percussion and play it live.

We feel that we need to show the audience that these compositions are not for religious purposes and that they are fully [musically] successful in their very nature. We’ve played these shows in Kiev, Zürich, Paris, Istanbul and at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and each time the audience was mesmerized, so we are trying to connect with the audience in Abu Dhabi in the same way.

SS What is it about Bach’s compositions that lends them to a fusion of percussion and piano?

BÖ Bach’s music is so strictly mathematical that you cannot change the structure whatsoever. So this leads Bach’s compositions to be very rhythmic. Of course, these are very hard variations. I’ve maybe listened to the variations hundreds of times to be able to adapt to the piano and percussion. The ten-finger technique used both by the pianist and the percussionist also plays a big role in being able to create a fusion between these two instruments.

SS You and Botvinov focus on Bach’s Goldberg Variations. What is it about that piece that inspires you both to perform it?

The first reason in choosing the Goldberg Variations is that the composition itself was not written with religious purposes. The second reason is that the piece was composed beautifully with its mathematics and rhythmic structure.

SS How would you describe your musical chemistry with Botvinov?

BÖ First of all we both are very disciplined musicians. His is a ten-finger technique and mine also, because I do not use drum sticks. This leads us to use our twenty fingers in perfect harmony.

SS What makes it so appealing to international audiences?

BÖ I think that the reason behind the performances being appreciated is that it is that, for the first time, such a courageous project is actually being accomplished and is a success.

SS In Abu Dhabi, do you feel people identify with your percussion. Does this feel familiar to Middle East audiences?

BÖ I think that they find the music to be familiar, and, as a result, their reaction is definitely positive. Because of this, I am also playing some Middle Eastern Arabic rhythms and solos for this audience.

It’s not very often that one receives international recognition two hundred fifty years after being placed in the ground. But with help from University of Wisconsin-Madison musicology professor Charles Dill and a host of international scholars and musicians, that’s exactly what’s happening for Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Rameau, a French composer (1683-1764) who lived during the reign of Louis XV, has become famous for his contributions to music theory, his early harpsichord works, and especially his operas. His 1722 Treatise on Harmonyis considered revolutionary for having incorporated philosophical ideas alongside practical musical issues. His operas were equally famous for their rich choral singing and elegant dancing. In the last few decades, interest in Rameau has intensified, with French scholars leading the way and organizing major festivals in Europe. Because of Dill’s renown as a scholar of Rameau and the Baroque, the UW-Madison School of Music will present a series of performances and talks about Rameau during the 2014-2015 academic year.

On 13 November 2014, the first of these events will kick off with a discussion about the expressive qualities in Rameau’s music (with visiting opera director David Ronis and Professor Anne Vila of the Department of French and Italian), followed by a concert the next day featuring Marc Vallon, UW-Madison professor of bassoon, in a mostly-Rameau concert. You can read the full schedule of events here.

We asked Prof. Dill to tell us a bit about himself and what makes Rameau an important figure in music.

University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) How did you first become interested in Rameau?

Charles Dill (CD) Modern audiences often view all composers of the past as struggling visionaries. This may be true of composers after Beethoven, but it isn’t true – or isn’t true in the same way – for earlier composers, even composers like Mozart or Haydn. They considered themselves to be working at a job. They wrote pieces to suit their performers, and the compositions were “disposable.” If something needed changing, the composer changed it, generally without much grumbling. They didn’t continue to garner attention for decades.

What first interested me about Rameau, then, was that he revised his operas extensively and these revised versions continued to be performed. This suggests all sorts of remarkable things about him and his works. Notably, he was alert to how audiences responded to his works to an unusual degree, and he felt some kind of obligation toward “getting the work right,” as it were. That’s a very modern way of thinking about music. Because of this attitude, he also took risks as a composer. He was a remarkably creative individual, and he was rewarded for it. His works dominated French opera for a period of fifty years, until well after his death. For his time and place, this truly was an unusual relationship between composer and audience.

Add to that Rameau’s work as a theorist. Thinkers had been speculating about how music works for as long as music had existed, but Rameau was the first to envision a comprehensive system that accounted for all of its aspects: how keys or tonalities come into being, why some harmonic progressions are more effective than others, how musical knowledge influences performance. We still employ his basic terminology for describing fundamental principles of music – chord inversion, tonic, dominant. There were flaws in his ideas, to be sure, and there have been countless other systems proposed since that make similar claims, but if you imagine music as an organized, coherent system – something we do every day – then you are, to a degree, following in his footsteps.

CD I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. When I began working in Parisian libraries in the late 1980s, as a graduate student completing my degree, there were only a handful of people studying Rameau. Students from that generation have done influential work. Thomas Christensen explained the development of Rameau’s music theory, Sylvie Bouissou became the general editor of the Rameau edition, and William Christie specialized in interpreting Rameau’s music in performance.

I was interested in Rameau’s relationship with audiences. Music criticism was still a fledgling enterprise in the eighteenth century, and yet his compositions elicited strong opinions, both for and against. He was one of the first composers to be treated not simply as a commodity, but as a public figure, one of the first to take that role seriously. To an unusual degree, he felt the need to experiment in his compositions, and yet he was also forced by circumstances to consider listeners and their perceptions in everything he wrote. After all this time, I still find this story remarkable.

Times have changed. Nowadays, France recognizes Rameau as one its most representative composers and devotes time, money, and effort to developing our knowledge of him. A small army of dedicated French researchers is poring over every available source and producing first-rate scholarship. They’re doing wonderful work.

UWM What contributions have you made to scholarship?

CD When I began writing about Rameau, there was a longstanding trend to approach composers solely from the vantage point of what they wrote. We could describe this as the “great composers” or “great works” approach. Discussing composers in this way cuts out some of the most interesting material: what audiences believed, how they liked what they heard, how they received the composers, and how composers responded to criticism. My book, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (1998), which Princeton University Press has recently reprinted as part of its Legacy series, addressed some of these questions. As an eminently public figure, Rameau was subject to intense scrutiny. Some critics distrusted opera as an overly sensual medium, and some regarded Rameau’s colorful music as an especially egregious example. Rameau encouraged these kinds of responses. Where earlier composers generally wrote simple, unobtrusive music, Rameau wrote music that demanded attention. In a way, then, he challenged critics and audience members to define their expectations regarding music openly and publicly. It is telling that, during the period in which he became popular, audiences changed, coming to resemble modern audiences more and more: they began to learn difficult and complex music by heart, they grew more quiet and became more attentive during performances.

My other contributions have had to do with aspects of his career. My early publications often dealt with the relationship between Rameau’s ideas as a music theorist and his actual compositions. Having an eighteenth-century composer who was so active on both fronts is truly unusual, and it allows us to think more carefully about the relationship between theory and practice. More recently, I’ve been interested in reconstructing Rameau’s intellectual life. He was a bit of a magpie, really, taking ideas from the writers and philosophers who most suited his needs, but given the time and place in which he lived, he could take from the best: Descartes and Malebranche were early sources of inspiration, but eventually, like so many of his contemporaries, he turned his attention to Locke. Among those who collaborated with him on projects were Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert. So I’ve been developing a clearer sense of what he himself actually believed, based on what he drew on from these various sources.”

UWM How does Rameau fit in with other well-known composers of the day?

CD Rameau was two years older than Handel and Bach, almost an exact contemporary. Interestingly, although there’s no evidence to suggest he knew their music well, he helped popularize in France the kinds of music they were writing. From the Handel side of things, he took the kind of virtuosic playing and singing we associate with Italian composition, and from the Bach side, he took an interest in complex counterpuntal and harmonic language. To these he added an extraordinary sense of color – few at this time were combining orchestras and voices in such surprising ways – and an endless gift for invention comparable to Bach’s and Handel’s. During the late 1740s, a faction arose at the French court that wanted to set limits on how many operas Rameau could compose, because they felt he was dominating the music scene so completely.

Rameau was well known internationally. Initially, this was the result of his theoretical ideas, which he began publishing in the 1720s; reviews appeared almost immediately in Germany. By the 1750s, when his theoretical ideas were being popularized, his work was receiving attention in Italy as well. He also became an international figure musically in this period. His works were performed in Italy and Germany, and they were influential among the reform composers of that generation – Traetta, Jommelli, and Gluck. (For example, the famous opening scene of Gluck’s Orfeo et Euridice, which begins in the midst of a funeral procession, was directly modeled on the beginning of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux.)

UWM What activities have taken place around the world this year, and where?

CD Well, as is always the case with composers, there have been performances around the world – in France and, more generally, Europe, obviously, but in the states as well, notably in New York and Washington, D. C. In fact, a phone app has circulated in France so that one can follow where Rameau is being performed every day this year.

Raphaëlle Legrand, who teaches at the Sorbonne, has put together a fascinating year-long series of presentations, open to the public, that combine historians, music theorists, professional musicians specializing in period instruments, and professional dancers specializing in historical dance techniques. This project is called the “Atelier Rameau” and it has an excellent website. It has been especially interesting to have singers, instrumentalists, and dancers working together, because dance is so basic to Rameau’s musical style. Performers quickly developed a new sense of what was and wasn’t possible when they began talking to each other!

Among the surprises, those in attendance learned that we are still discovering eighteenth-century production scores for Rameau’s earliest and most important works, and that Rameau was the composer of the famous round, Frère Jacques, which he included in a recently discovered composition manual. I can honestly say that this past year has advanced our knowledge of Rameau and his music in unprecedented ways.

Sunday, 9 November 2014, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For more than twenty-eight years, the wall completely cut off East Berlin from West Berlin, and its collapse was accompanied by public events and celebrations that asserted music’s role as a symbol of unity and reconciliation. Some performances were impromptu.

Moved by television images of East and West Berliners reunited, the Soviet-born cellist Mstislav Rostropovich flew in on a private jet from his home in Paris. All regular flights to Berlin were booked solid. Soon after, he went to Checkpoint Charlie to welcome East Berliners – with music.

The world-famous musician borrowed a rickety old guard’s chair and parked himself in front of a graffiti-filled part of the wall. He began to play Bach cello Suites (BWV 1007-12) for admiring East Germans getting their first taste of freedom.

“I did it from my heart,” Rostropovich said at the time, underscored by the fact that he had been living in exile since 1974 and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1978. Rostropovich later said that in that moment he managed to unite the two parts of his existence that had been separate: his life in Russia before 1974 and his life in the West afterwards.

Mick Eve, sax player for Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, was mooching around the musical instrument shops in London’s Denmark Street as one did in 1966. His friend Chas Chandler, whom Mick had known as bassist for the Animals but who had recently returned from a talent-fishing trip to America, ran out of a guitar store and said excitedly in broad Geordie: “Mick, Mick! You got to come and hear this bloke play; I found him in New York!”

“I don’t need to go into the shop, Chas,” replied Mick in droll Cockney, “I can hear ’im from ’ere,” which he certainly could – a restlessly remarkable, eerily savage sound emanating from within. This was the afternoon of 22 September 1966, Jimi Hendrix’s first full day in England.

Eve’s is one of the many stories not included in the biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side, narrating the life of unarguably the greatest guitarist and blues magician of all time, as he left New York for London.

Hendrix had arrived aboard a Pan Am flight, little known in his own country and a stranger to London. He had been born of Native and African-American blood in Seattle to a poor father who cared moderately for his son and a mother whom he adored but barely knew, and who died when Jimi was fifteen.

He had joined the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army to avoid a jail sentence for car theft (under a judge’s ruling) but hated the army immediately. A regimental report read: “Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations.” It is important, says Paul Gilroy, a historian of black culture, to see Hendrix as an ex-paratrooper who gradually became an advocate of peace.

Hendrix collected a small coterie of dazzled admirers in New York, among them John Cale of the Velvet Underground who, after playing a concert with Patti Smith in Paris last week, recalled going down into a dive bar in Sullivan Street to see Hendrix play during the mid-60s. “There was this fella heckling him all the way through, giving him gyp until Hendrix said, ‘I see we’ve got Polly Parrot in the house tonight.’ He got no trouble after that.”

Hendrix also amazed Chandler at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village one night, enough to fly him to London where the hunger for blues was inexplicably greater than in America. “Black American music got nowhere near white AM radio,” says the man who met Hendrix at Heathrow, Tony Garland, who would manage Hendrix’s British company, Anim. “And Jimi was too white for black radio. Here, there were a lot of white guys listening to blues from America and wanting to sound like their heroes.”

In London, Hendrix with his band Experience forged a new soundscape, stretching the blues to some outer limit of expression, ethereal but fearsome, lyrical but dangerous, sublime but ruthless. And yet, he wrote: “I don’t want anyone to stick a psychedelic label round my neck. Sooner Bach or Beethoven.”

This was not serendipitous, nor was it as effortlessly “natural,” as Hendrix himself often suggested, or even pure genius: Hendrix had found an alchemist with sound in the unlikely form of a sonic wave engineer in the service of the Ministry of Defense, Roger Mayer.

Mayer was an inventor of electronic musical devices, including the Octavia guitar effect which created a “doubling” echo. “I’d shown it to Jimmy Page,” Mayer recalls at his home in Surrey, “but he said it was too far out. Jimi said, the moment we met: ‘Yeah, I’d like to try that stuff.’”

Mayer left the Admiralty and thus began a partnership that changed the sound of sound. “And don’t forget,” says Tappy Wright, who had been a roadie but joined the management team, “these were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic but stretched to the fucking limit.”

Mayer is fascinating on the science of the sound: “When you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form. . . . The input from the player projects forward the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive . . . if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples. It depends how you throw the stone, or the wind.”

Casting this magic around working men’s clubs in the north of England, and opening for the Walker Brothers and Engelbert Humperdinck, Hendrix forged his furrow with what Gilroy calls “transgressions of redundant musical and racial rules.”

“He would take from blues, jazz only Coltrane could play in that way,” says Keith Altham, a reporter for the New Musical Express, who became a kind of embedded Hendrix correspondent. “And Dylan was the greatest influence. But he’d listen to Mozart, he’d read sci-fi, and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix.”

Mozart, Handel, Bach, Mahler: influences which Hendrix listed in a collection of writings recently assembled by his friends Alan Douglas and Peter Neal to create the nearest we have to an autobiography. And appositely so, for Hendrix’s address in London, which he called “the only home I ever had,” with the only woman he ever really loved, was the same at which George Frederick Handel had resided in another era: 22 Brook St, London W1.

On the night he arrived in England, Hendrix met Kathy Etchingham, his match and lover. Her recollections are priceless: she remembers Hendrix buying music by Handel and jamming along with his guitar on the sofa. “People often saw Jimi on stage looking incredibly intense and serious,” she said over dinner in London a few years ago accompanied by her husband, an Australian GP. “And suddenly this smile would come across his face, almost a laugh, for no apparent reason.”

“I remember very well [Jimi] sitting on the bed or the floor at home in Brook Street; sometimes he would play a riff for hours until he had it just right. Then he’d throw his head back and laugh. Those were the moments he’d got it right for himself, not for anyone else.”

Except perhaps Kathy too: Hendrix wrote The Wind Cries Mary, her middle name, when she had stormed out after an argument.

Hendrix returned to America to record Electric Ladyland, during the making of which producer Eddie Kramer remembers “his wonderful, swaying dance coming off the keyboards [played by Steve Winwood], in a waltz with the guitar.” Hendrix then gave the name “Electric Ladyland” to his grand studio project in New York. And any suggestion that he had some kind of “death wish” is given the lie by his own written intentions to record there “something else – like with Handel and Bach and Muddy Waters and flamenco.”

Patti Smith remembers the opening party in summer 1970, from which Hendrix himself took a break to join her on the steps outside. “He was so full of ideas,” Smith recalls, “the different sounds he was going to create in this studio – wider landscapes, experiments with musicians, new soundscapes. All he had to do was to get over to England, play the [Isle of Wight] festival, and get back to work.”

Hendrix never made it back to work. He died in the street on which I was born: Lansdowne Crescent, Notting Hill. I’d moved a block away by the time I picked up the Evening Standard on the way home from school on 18 September 1970, flabbergasted by the news. The front-page picture showed Hendrix playing at that Isle of Wight festival less than three weeks beforehand. I’d been there; his searing cry against war, Machine Gun, was still ringing in my ears.

Back home, I changed into all white and waited for cover of darkness to go round to 22 Lansdowne Crescent, where Hendrix had died in the basement, swallowing vomit after a night out with wine, amphetamines and a German girl called Monika.

There was no one there. I took a piece of chalk out of my pocket, scrawled “Kiss the sky, Jimi” on the pavement and crossed the road to ponder the gravity of the moment and place. A man emerged and washed away my scanty tribute with a mop.

Among the last fifty years’ most unfortunate historical illiteracies has been the myth that it took Vatican II to bring about the most elementary courtesy between Catholics and non-Catholics. Before 1962, the legend goes, Catholics and Protestants were trapped in a kind of eternal Thirty Years’ War, lusting after the blood of our “separated brethren.” For a good answer to this legend, it is worth examining the manner in which Marcel Dupré – whom his star pupil Olivier Messiaen called “the greatest organ virtuoso who has ever lived” – first championed the organ repertoire of J. S. Bach for French concertgoers who, in the years after World War I, still knew very little of it.

Dupré died in 1971. For most of his long lifetime, he dominated the French organ scene, very much as his almost exact contemporary Charles de Gaulle dominated French politics. Today, neither man’s reputation is what it was. In particular it has become fashionable to snipe at Dupré’s Bach recordings, with their seamless legato and lack of concern for period practice. Yet this sniping is unjust, and one day the pendulum of taste will swing back. Dupré’s level of brilliance at the console cannot be discounted forever.

The impact that Bach left on Dupré’s thinking derived partly from the initial instruction he underwent. Born as he was in 1886 – at Rouen, where Joan of Arc remained potent in the communal culture – he had the privilege of knowing first-hand the Bach-loving, organ-building genius Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, who was then in the destitute but still deeply influential twilight of his career. Even Dupré was not quite old enough to have met his hero César Franck, but he achieved the next best thing: protracted study with Franck’s old colleague Alexandre Guilmant; with former Franck pupil Louis Vierne, the almost stone-blind Notre Dame organist; and with Charles-Marie Widor, whose Toccata has adorned a million weddings.

Through Widor and Guilmant above all, Dupré came to know the Bach tradition which had meant so much to Franck. But such knowledge, without the technique to convey it, was not nearly enough, and none appreciated this better than Dupré himself. In a 1948 interview for a Minnesota radio station, Dupré would utter the following credo: “To get perfection in a work, you must first get perfection in a short passage: that is the root of all virtuosity.” What Dupré preached, Dupré practiced, in one of France’s most unusual concert events from the interwar period.

The Great War had let Dupré off comparatively lightly. Traces of childhood disease (a near-fatal bout of golden staph) had destroyed his hopes of seeing active service, so he spent the years of combat in the pharmacy department of a Parisian military hospital. Army life has been described as “ninety-nine percent boredom to one percent terror,” and whilst Dupré’s hospital enjoyed the protection of distance from the worst fighting, the losses of several colleagues on the Western Front concentrated his mind wonderfully. Besides, hospital duties, by their very nature, enforce contact with human mortality in a fashion that very little other civilian employment does. Through a gradual process, Dupré concluded that he owed it to Bach, to music, and to whatever European civilization emerged after the war, to do something that had hitherto been thought not just pointless, but impossible.

In one sentence: Dupré vowed that with the advent of peace he would publicly play all of Bach’s known organ compositions from memory. He could not have horrified his supporters more if, like Albert Schweitzer, he had taken up the missionary life in western Africa, surrounded by lepers and goats. Earlier organists, for all their skill, had generally used the printed scores in their Bach performances. Widor probably knew as much Bach as any Frenchman of his time did, but even he had large gaps in his knowledge, gaps unimaginable in our own pampered epoch of cut-price complete editions.

Moreover, although Bach had not actually been banned from French musical life during 1914-1918, affronted Gallic national pride towards the vanquished foe made Dupré’s project seem quixotic amid the years of Georges Clemenceau’s vindictive prime ministry and calls for “squeezing Germany till the pips squeak.” Numerous Germans, for their part, assumed that the frivolous French could not comprehend Bach at all. Moreover, in the prevailing state of neurological science, it was by no means sure that the human brain was even built for so gigantic an amount of memorization as Dupré envisaged.

Through his ten concerts in 1920 at the Paris Conservatoire – concerts of Bach, the whole Bach, and nothing but Bach – Dupré proved his critics wrong. He repeated his feat the following year, at another venue in the same city: the Palais du Trocadéro, which then housed a Cavaillé-Coll masterpiece beloved of Guilmant and Franck. (During the late 1930s, it succumbed to a more than usually maladroit rebuilding, much to Dupré’s regret; in that decade, it is fair to suppose more organs were destroyed by insensitive renovations without the slightest political agenda, than were wrecked by even the most bellicose kerosene-toting communists and anarchists of the Spanish Civil War.) Widor happily paid homage to his former student’s success. In a nunc dimittis offered to Dupré’s father, Widor said: “I can die content, for I know the French organ school will remain in good hands.” (With characteristic recalcitrance, Widor didn’t die at all after delivering this heroic valediction. He lived on for another seventeen years, vigorously energetic till the end.)

At a creative level, Dupré’s devotion to Bach bore its most obvious subsequent fruit in his Seventy-nine Chorales for the Organ, op. 28 of 1931, commissioned by Gustave Ogier, a retired banker. Ogier found his enforced spare time somewhat oppressive and wanted to start playing the organ in earnest. Dupré easily met the implied challenge of providing material that (unlike his better-known symphonic epics for the King of Instruments) would be technically straightforward enough for Ogier to manage, but at the same time interesting enough for more experienced players to appreciate. Issued by H. W. Gray of Van Nuys, California – as opposed to Bornemann in Paris, which issued most of Dupré’s other works – the Seventy-nine Chorales became that unimaginable thing: an instance of organ sheet-music which actually made a profit. It has never gone out of print. Once, when Mme. Jeannette Dupré had accompanied her husband on a visit to one of Honolulu’s two cathedrals, “a copy of the Chorales [so reports England’s Dupré scholar Graham Steed] was lying open on the music rack of the organ.”

Evidence of Dupré’s profound esteem towards Bach’s own collection of miniatures, the Orgelbüchlein (BWV 599-644), is perceptible in every phrase. None of the Orgelbüchlein’s chorale preludes lasts for more than three pages. The same is true of Dupré’s collection. Bach based his pieces on Lutheran rather than Catholic melodies. So did Dupré. He tends to avoid those hymns where the same tune turns up in both Lutheran and Catholic contexts. (Admittedly a few instances do appear: In dulci jubilo is one; another is Nunn komm’ der Heiden Heiland, note-for-note the same as the plainchant theme Veni redemptor gentium in the traditional Catholic ceremonies for Advent.) But mere archeologism will nowhere be found. The Seventy-nine Chorales can at times administer a salutary shock to hearers – every congregation has them – who want all their organ music to suggest either syrup or lavender-water.

Dupré spent his last years, in musical terms, under something of a cloud. He found himself totally out of sympathy with the 1960s’ arbiters of French musical vogue: Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, and the rest. Ostensibly musical counterparts to the student gauchistes of May 1968 filled him with especial horror. His biographer and ex-student Michael Murray includes a dejected little anecdote of the octogenarian master confronted with an all-night avant-garde broadcast on French television:

Dupré watched for about fifteen minutes as “music” was made by the sole agency of a continually slamming door. Jeannette recalls that he turned to her sadly and said, “It is finished, done with, for the arts.” Nor was he heartened by her reply: “Nonsense! You’ll see. You say that music is finished, but look at your recitals and what do you see? You see that at least half of your audiences are young people. Look again. All is not ended for the arts.” But he could not be reassured.

Still, we have plenty of recorded evidence showing what Dupré the performer could achieve when at the height of his powers. (A gallant if cash-strapped nonprofit organization – the Association des Amis de l’Art de Marcel Dupré – does what it can to preserve his sonic legacy in ancient and modern repertoire alike, not to mention releasing his extant broadcasts for Radiodiffusion Française.) And still, like Everest, stands that extraordinary achievement of 1920–1921: Dupré’s practical demonstration that Bach was no mere dry-as-dust theoretician, but part of every Catholic’s and every Christian’s birthright.

The exploration of the mysteries of harmony that began in the sixteenth century has much in common with the exploration of the real world with the help of the natural sciences and critical thinking. Similarly, the journeys into the most remote key areas were only possible after composers had learned to look behind the rigid system of modes and hexachords and began to see the sheer unlimited possibilities of transposition and modulation. Since these harmonic experiments were long considered a secret art, it is no surprise that they were confined to solo keyboard instruments, where chords and their progressions could be handled by the ten fingers of the two hands and where the composer and the performer were often the same person. Yet at first the keyboard with its preset and fixed tuning allowed excursions into remote key areas only to a limited degree. As a consequence, adjustments to the old Pythagorean tuning were necessary, and this led to various forms of mean-tone and irregular temperament culminating in the establishment of equal temperament in the early nineteenth century.

J. S. Bach’s monumental double cycle of The Well-tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) has always been regarded as a major landmark in the history of keyboard music and the utilization of the full spectrum of keys. The first part, containing preludes and fugues through all twenty-four major and minor keys, was completed in 1722; the second, of the same scope, followed around 1739/40. Although The Well-tempered Clavier is often associated with the use of equal temperament, we know from various documents that Bach – like most of his contemporaries – actually favored a pragmatic temperament that made playing in remote tonal areas possible but at the same time kept the variegation of the individual keys. The unique artistic value of Bach’s double cycle lies not merely in the comprehensive treatment of this key system, but rather in the idea of combining the richness of harmonies he explores with an equally comprehensive richness of musical styles and composing techniques.

Bach drew his inspiration from various models – some of which will be introduced 22-27 June 2014 during the keyboard program presented by Andreas Staier and Peter Wollny at the thirteenth-century Royaumont Abbey north of Paris. One of the earliest journeys through the key areas is taken in John Bull’s Fantasia Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, which leads a simple diatonic subject set in a strictly contrapuntal fashion by means of transposition through a labyrinth of harmony. Another way of exploring the spectrum of keys is the free improvisatory style called stylus phantasticus in the seventeenth century. A fine example of this type of composing is Georg Böhm’s Praeludium, Fuga et Postludium in G minor, a piece transmitted in a manuscript copy from Bach’s circle.

Bach and his German contemporaries devoted much of their compositional efforts to adapting and merging the French and Italian national styles. Thus Bach studied and held in high esteem the works of Antonio Vivaldi and François Couperin. The combination of German, Italian and French elements eventually yielded the highly expressive and galant mixed style that became the great composer’s legacy to his sons and students.

On Petula Clark‘s latest album Lost in You is a track called Reflections. The music is by Bach [BWV 208] and the lyrics by Petula herself. They hark back to a time when she roamed barefoot in the Welsh mountains near the home of her grandparents with whom she spoke Welsh. They were the years before she was famous, before the British public claimed her as “our Pet” – which means they are very distant indeed.

Fame came to Petula at the tender age of nine when she was “discovered” singing during an air raid on a wartime Forces broadcast in 1942. At eleven she was singing at the Royal Albert Hall and by her teens she was a radio star. Nicknamed the “singing sweetheart,” she performed for King George VI, General Montgomery and Churchill. It was, in her words, a “weird” childhood. “But I wasn’t unhappy. I loved singing because when I sang I didn’t feel so shy. My life wasn’t all showbiz. My sister and I stayed for months at a time with our grandparents in their stone cottage [in Abercanaid, near Merthyr Tydfil] with no electricity and I just loved it. What’s a normal childhood anyway? And let’s not forget, it started me on a very good career.”

Indeed so. Hers has spanned more than seventy years, four continents and just about every performance medium – radio, television, film, recording and stage. She has sold seventy million records and is the most successful female artist the United Kingdom has ever produced. A month off her eighty-first birthday she has just embarked on a ten-date British tour.

After seven decades at the top she has very firm ideas about how she wishes to present herself. The one subject guaranteed to incur her wrath is age. Even over a bad phone line the frostiness is palpable.

“It’s offensive and it’s rude and people keep ramming it down your throat,” she says. “I said to my agent the other day, ‘Is this how it’s going to be now – age becomes the reason for an interview?’ I don’t think about my age and I don’t care about anyone else’s. It’s about doing what you do well and about learning and progressing. I’m still learning. I don’t ever think I know how to do this.

“When I was a child I had no nerves at all. That certainly isn’t true nowadays because more is expected of me. But every time I go on stage I think ‘tonight I’m going to get found out.'”

Point taken. But isn’t a performer still working and at the top of her game at eighty something to be celebrated? After all, touring is arduous for anyone.

“I don’t find it arduous. Things are taken care of and you have a lot of laughs. I’m seeing parts of the country I haven’t seen for years. I really love touring and it’s not as if I’m doing a world tour like a rock band.” Oohhkaay.

Her career divides easily into chapters. In the Forties she was Britain’s answer to Shirley Temple, singing in her own TV shows and acting in films such as Here Come the Huggetts. In the Fifties her father Leslie – whose own showbiz dreams had been scotched by his parents – formed record label Polygon Records to manage Petula’s burgeoning recording career.

She was doing well in Britain when a French promoter invited her to perform at the Olympia in Paris in 1957. After much persuasion she agreed and her life changed for ever.

“I wasn’t keen to go. I couldn’t even say hello in French and I thought France smelled of garlic. I was so English. But they kept calling me, saying there was this French performer called Dalida who was copying my records and I must come over to ‘defend’ my songs. They nagged me into it. I did one performance – not very well because I had a cold – and they went crazy.”

As a result Vogue Records in Paris wanted to discuss her recording for them. During the meeting the next day the lights went out and someone came in to change the bulb. When the light came back on the bulb-changer was revealed to be Claude Wolff, the company’s very good-looking PR man. It was a coup de foudre, love at first sight.

“That was it,” says Petula. “I didn’t care about having a career in France. He was my motivation.” And was it the same for him? “Well he had a girlfriend at the time which made things a bit complicated but yes, apparently it was.”

Neither spoke the other’s language – “We had rather halting conversations” – but in 1961 Claude and Petula married. They lived in France because it was easier for her to work there than for him to work here. Moving to France also enabled her to break away from her father. She had found fame and fortune as a child and he wanted her to remain one, whereas to the French she was a sexy young woman.

Her fame soon spread beyond France to other French-speaking territories and throughout Europe. As well as French, she recorded in German, Italian and Spanish.

Everything changed again in 1964 when songwriter Tony Hatch played her a few bars of a song inspired by his first trip to New York. It was still unfinished but Petula liked it. The song was Downtown. It became a worldwide hit (it is still her best known song) and launched her into what was arguably her golden age. America couldn’t get enough of her and she made TV history there.

During a duet with Harry Belafonte for her own “special” for NBC, she took hold of his arm. The sponsors were horrified by this inter-racial affection and demanded a retake. Petula and Claude not only refused, they also ensured all other takes were destroyed, leaving only the touching take. “This was 1968. The Civil Rights Movement was in full flow and they were worried about selling cars!” she says, still exasperated.

By then Petula also had two young daughters – Barbara and Kate – who stayed in Europe with their father while their mother was working in America. Recently she spoke of the guilt she still feels at having left them so much.

“I tried hard to be the perfect mother, the perfect wife and a great performer. I thought I could do it all but it can’t be done. I had a good stab at it but being a parent and married is a full-time job. And you married is a full-time job. And you don’t turn your back on America.” For their part her children assured her there is nothing to forgive.

Nonetheless she scaled down her workload in the mid-Seventies after the birth of her son Patrick. But she and Claude had drifted apart. They separated in the Eighties but have never divorced and remain close. She admits to having “someone special” in her life now but declines to elaborate.

The next chapter of her career surprised even Petula when Trevor Nunn asked her to play Norma Desmond in the stage production of Sunset Boulevard.

“At first I said ‘no way’. Then I asked ‘What do you think I can bring to it?’ and he said, ‘Vulnerability and humor.’ He broke me down.” She has now played Norma longer than anyone else. “I’ve always played nice people so it was great fun to play a bitch!” Whom does she admire among today’s artists? “There are many great women out there but I’m certainly not in the same business as Lady Gaga.”

Unlike many of her pedigree she is not dismissive of X Factor and its wannabes. Then again her own success came more or less overnight. The difference is that hers has never stopped.

Unlike fellow child star Julie Andrews she has yet to be made a dame. “I don’t think I care. What’s important is doing your job well. When I go out on stage I still ask myself ‘do I really know how to do this?'”

It’s fifty years since Ward Swingle and a group of Paris-based session singers first experimented with translating Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) into a swing feel. Without changing a note of the original scores, they added jazz scat and a rhythm section to intricate melody lines that had never before been attempted by the human voice. The result was the unmistakeable, era-defining sound of “Swingle Singing.” Their 1963 debut LP took them to number one in the charts, won multiple Grammy awards and redefined what the voice could achieve.

Five decades on, the Swingle Singers are still at the vanguard of vocal music. Successive generations of singers have expanded the repertoire to include jazz, pop, rock and Latin music, via collaborations with artists as diverse as Luciano Berio to Jamie Cullum. The Swingle Singers of 2013 are an a cappella super-group complete with a five-octave range and their own vocal rhythm section. But the group has always kept Bach’s music close to their hearts.

In celebration of their fiftieth anniversary, today’s line-up of seven young and versatile voices will present a special Bach program on 23 May 2013, featuring some of their favorite preludes, fugues, airs and inventions, as part of the ongoing Bach Unwrapped series at Kings Place in London.